Patience Hester, midwife of Liberty, West Virginia, senses the state of the world in November 1941 with terrible foreboding. Her husband, Daniel, a veterinarian and veteran of the First World War, has said that if war comes again to the United States, he will refuse to go. As healers, the Hesters’ moral predicament offers a compelling premise; add Patience’s past as a political activist for liberal causes and her distaste for Nazi Germany, and Harman has drawn her battle lines.

I wish I could tell you that Once a Midwife takes off from this promising platform, delivering a meaningful narrative that explores conscience and convenience. Unfortunately, directly or by implication, the novel lets just about everyone off the hook, which results in a moral tale lacking the requisite compass. Evil boils away until the dregs belong only to the local KKK or the SS assassins of Eastern European killing fields. Racism? Not here; the African-American characters may receive a cold look or two, but most everyone else is the soul of tolerance. Somehow, the Holocaust has become public knowledge in rural West Virginia a year before anywhere else, and, even more miraculously, nobody in Liberty voices prejudice against Jews, even at a meeting of America First, an organization notorious for anti-Semitism. Consequently, the bad guys are the few, irredeemable Them, whereas the good guys are Us. And since everyone’s the same underneath, why can’t we all live in peace and harmony?

Asking that all-important question in December 1941 might be a bit late, but, in any case, the people in this novel aren’t flexible enough to grapple with it. Patience tells the reader and other characters what she feels, referring to facts from her past or current events, announcements that turn a potential person into a headline. Daniel’s even less convincing, for he sounds alternately like a whiny adolescent and a holier-than-thou prophet. Rather than show why he’s a pacifist or have him struggle with his beliefs, Harman has him recite potted history that could have come from a seventh-grade textbook; when pressed, he tells generic stories about his war service. So he’s a talking head who’s got glib, half-baked answers for everything, not a deep-thinking man of conscience. But he’s not alone, for characters in Once a Midwife seldom talk to each other. They talk at each other, usually to dump information—and boy, are they misinformed.

I firmly believe that historical novelists should have poetic license, and that the writing and presentation matter ten times more than research. Still, I need to believe that the author has some sense of what facts she’s changing and why, whereas here, I question Harman’s grasp of the era, its events, and especially its timeline. The war seems to serve merely as a cauldron to dish up convenient plot points. Meanwhile, the premise contains enough untapped conflict to fill a novel by itself.

For instance, why doesn’t Patience — or anyone — ask Daniel whether, as a veterinarian serving a farm population, he’d try to get a deferment for an exempt profession, especially given his age? He might not listen, because he refuses even to register for the draft, but so much the better—another point of conflict with his beleaguered, overwhelmed wife, more room for him to show (not explain) his principles. Also, Daniel’s situation might have changed when, a year after Pearl Harbor, Selective Service lowered the age of draft liability to thirty-eight, a fact that the narrative doesn’t mention but a circumstance that offers another possible iteration of the same conflict.

But these moral complexities, which should be the novel’s strength, wind up resolving themselves. At several points, Patience wonders whether her husband’s a weakling or has taken dubious positions, for which she hates him for short bursts, invariably snapping out of it. It’s as though the narrative prevents the characters from getting too upset with one another—a common flaw in feel-good novels, but unfortunately, Harman pushes this into the realm of cluelessness. She evokes the hurtful, ignorant trope that divides Germany into a basically decent but cowed majority and a tiny sliver guilty of all evil, a morally simplistic position that denies history and insults the victims.

Worse, Harman underlines the (studiously low-level) bigotry, rampant jingoism, small-mindedness, and government propaganda visible in Liberty; weighs that against Axis lies and brutalities; and implies that it’s a wash. I must confess I nearly lost it when a group of German POWs recently arrived to West Virginia sing a Christmas carol and in this way prove their basic humanity to Patience’s satisfaction. With little hesitation–and even less thought to what they might have done–she gives a pass to men who’ve bloodied and terrorized half of Europe. Where’s the moral sense in that?

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Early on in this superb, unflinching novel, its protagonist, Ann “Axie” Muldoon, learns never to trust a man who says, “Trust me.” It’s a lesson she has cause to remember many times, not least because she sees what happens to other women who fall for it.

Axie grows up in 1860s New York, in the most squalid tenement imaginable:

. . . the cabbage cooking and the piss in the vestibule, the sloppers emptied right off the stair. Mackerel heads and pigeon bones was all around rotting, and McGloon’s pig rootled below amongst the peels and oyster shells. The fumes mingled with the odors of us hundredsome souls cramped in there like matches in a box, on four floors, six rooms a floor. Do the arithmetic and you will see we didn’t have no space to cross ourselves.

But the one thing she has is her family, which consists of her mother, younger sister, and toddler brother. They’re devoted to one another, proud of their Irish origins, ready to laugh when they may, and careful not to provoke evil sprites through a misstep. But when trouble brings about the family’s dispersal, Axie discovers what real suffering is, and you just know there’ll be no magical ending.

New York City’s Broadway in 1860 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

However, Axie’s not the type to give up, and she finds her feet with a married couple named Evans, both doctors, and their kind-hearted housekeeper, Mrs. Browder. At first, Axie has no idea what kind of medicine her benefactors practice and is content to learn the domestic skills that Mrs. Browder is all too happy to teach her. Gradually, however, her curiosity leads her to the Evans’s library, and to understand the medical texts she finds there, she learns to read better. I like how Manning handles Axie’s discoveries, evident to the reader long before the girl herself figures out that Mrs. Evans is a midwife and sometime abortionist. You sense right away that Axie will learn and practice these skills and that she’ll never turn away an unfortunate woman who seeks her help.

Meanwhile, though, a boy she once knew has crossed her path again–Charlie, an orphan like herself. Daring, charming, born with the gift of gab, Charlie sweet-talks her, urging Axie to trust him. That in itself is a red flag, of course, but Axie can’t always help herself. Their scenes together provide ample evidence of how even women who know better can betray their common sense. Something tells Axie that Charlie may not be a scoundrel after all, but, without giving anything away, let’s just say that he tests that hope.

If you read My Notorious Life, and I heartily recommend that you do, skip the jacket flap until you’ve finished the book. I’ve made that a habit these days, sampling just enough to get the premise, and then only if I haven’t learned it from another source. And in this case especially, I’m glad I skipped it. Scribner’s publicist did Manning a tremendous disservice, telling far too much, and, if you ask me, not always accurately.

For similar reasons, I once again have to ask why an author as talented as she, in such command of voice, character, wit, language, and sheer storytelling, should settle for a prologue and chapters that jump ahead when she could have narrated My Notorious Life in sequential order and done just fine. Most men Axie meets are ignorant hypocrites when it comes to female sexuality, and most women accept their judgments as truth, even if they should know better. So it’s no secret that if Axie persists in her newfound calling, she’ll run into trouble. I see no reason to foreshadow that.

That said, however, I can’t praise My Notorious Life enough.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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Damyanti Biswas is an author, blogger, animal-lover, spiritualist. Her work is represented by Ed Wilson from the Johnson & Alcock agency. When not pottering about with her plants or her aquariums, you can find her nose deep in a book, or baking up a storm.